


Shatterdome Kids and the Haunted Jaeger

by hauntedjaeger (saellys)



Series: Shatterdome Kids [1]
Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Gen, Mild Angst, Science Buddies!, Team Hot Dads
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-24
Updated: 2013-09-28
Packaged: 2017-12-27 13:14:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 8,635
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/979349
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saellys/pseuds/hauntedjaeger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are some pretty weird things happening in the Shatterdome hangar. Can Tokyo's Daughter and Sydney's Son solve the mystery with SCIENCE? Order Book One of the Shatterdome Kids trilogy from your Scholastic Book Club flyer today!</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Tumblr and fanart inspiration strike again! This fic is a direct result of these: 
> 
> http://daleconradsshuttershades.tumblr.com/post/62112651049/it-varys-iscawen-if-mako-and-chuck-ever-hung
> 
> http://dragonzair.tumblr.com/post/60824943410/this-is-for-jess-whos-pretty-much-been-a
> 
> And later there might be some of this, just because: 
> 
> http://frikadeller.tumblr.com/post/62056404671/after-sparring-in-the-kwoon
> 
> Also, this fic is not affiliated with "Kids of the Shatterdome," which is a really great fic you should just go read right now.
> 
> EDIT: And then Jazzmoth made some AMAZING chapter headers. Ohmagawd go follow them on Tumblr now.

  


Lima, Peru  
October 17, 2017  
1454 hours

Mako heard Chuck Hansen coming all the way from the end of the catwalk. His sneakers were too big for him, and he didn’t know how to walk without stomping. “You’re gonna get in trouble, hanging out up here,” he said as he sat beside her and dangled his legs through the railing.

_Only if they catch us because you’re so loud_ , Mako thought, but there was plenty of noise in the hangar below and no one would notice two kids thirty stories above the deck. She shrugged at him, then set her elbows on her neatly folded legs and her chin in her hands.

“What are you doing, anyway? It’s not safe to be in here without shielding when they crack the Jaegers open.”

“Observing,” Mako pronounced carefully. The amount of radiation she would get from a few minutes’ exposure to an unshielded reactor was nothing to worry about. She nodded toward Horizon Brave, its glowing core uncovered as the techs made adjustments. “I’m waiting to see it…” The word was ぴくぴく動く, but she didn’t know the English equivalent. “... move.”

Chuck looked at her sideways. “It does that when the pilots are in it,” he said slowly.

_I’m not stupid_ , Mako thought, feeling her cheeks burn. Sometimes Chuck spoke to her like he was older than fourteen, or like she was younger than twelve.  She took a deep breath. “The maintenance crews say that sometimes the Jaegers move on their own.”

Chuck rolled his eyes. “Haunted Jaegers are just a Dome legend.”

“They’re not haunted,” she told him. “There’s a Drift recorder in the Conn-Pod. If it… goes off… while the Jaeger is on standby, it might perform a motion from the recording.”

“Bollocks.” Chuck only used that word when his father wasn’t around. “Without pilots in the cradle, it’s just a glitch with no power behind it. A Drift recording can’t move a Jaeger. And what about the Mark IIIs? Their Conn-Pods aren’t even attached when they’re in the dome, so how could the Pons make them move?”

Mako suggested, “Muscle memory.” Chuck jutted his chin, not buying it. “Okay. Let’s ask Doctor Gottlieb.”

Chuck started to protest that he didn’t really care about this argument, but Mako got up and walked off down the catwalk, and he hurried to catch up.

They took the elevator down to the Shatterdome’s ground level, and followed a long corridor all the way around the hangar to the research lab. The lab was a clean, well organized space with a wall of sliding chalkboards at the back and a row of terminals to one side, where three research assistants worked quietly. Doctor Gottlieb perched before a glowing holographic display, squinting through his glasses. He was in his late twenties, but he dressed like an aging professor in a sweater vest, creased trousers, and saddle shoes. He had a crisp English accent, though he was raised in Germany. “Good afternoon, Miss Mori, Mister Hansen. It’s not Wednesday, is it?”

Wednesday afternoons were when Doctor Gottlieb spent an hour presenting a blend of chaos theory, advanced calculus, and theoretical physics as a supplement to Mako and Chuck’s tutoring. Mako found it difficult to keep up with the lecture portion, as Doctor Gottlieb tended to speak faster when he was very interested in a subject, but when it came to writing proofs and applying models, he said she was a natural. It didn’t make sense to talk about mathematics, after all--the numbers were a language of their own.

“No, Doctor Gottlieb,” said Mako as she walked over to his console. “But we had a question. What are you working on?”

“The Mark IV operating system,” Gottlieb told her, rotating the display to give her a better view of a scrolling column of code. “We’re in debug mode now, and it’ll be finished well before the first Mark IV. This is the lightest OS yet--three hundred terabytes smaller than the Mark III, and more adaptable by far. But I don’t think that was your question.”

“Oh, no,” Mako said, tearing her eyes away from the cascade of machine language. “We wondered if it’s possible that a Drift recording could trigger movement in a dormant Jaeger.”

Gottlieb sat back in his swivel chair and glanced from Mako to Chuck, who looked away, wanting no part in this conversation. “Have the Jaeger technicians been telling you ghost stories?” Gottlieb asked, and Mako was glad he wasn’t smiling when he said it.

Mako shook her head. “If there’s a rational explanation, it’s not a ghost story.”

Doctor Gottlieb _hmph_ ed approvingly and swiped one hand through the holographic display, closing the debug program. He called up a Jaeger schematic, reached into the display, and pulled it into three dimensions. “Here is Lucky Seven,” he said, and Chuck, despite himself, came over for a better look. Gottlieb zoomed in on the Conn-Pod. “In the feedback cradle, relay gel and the Pons device join forces to bring physical and mental impulses to the fluid synapse system, which then--” he dragged the view down, tapping a few keys to make parts of Lucky Seven’s right arm light up in red--”moves the muscle strands. A Jaeger’s range of motion is much greater than a human’s, but we never see that because the pilots don’t move that way. When certain motions are performed repetitively, such as Hercules Hansen’s right hook…”

A few more keystrokes, and Lucky Seven took on a boxer’s stance. Gottlieb animated it in slow motion: the arm swung from vertical to horizontal, and the display showed the active strands stretch and contract. The movement still looked odd, too mechanical. The animation looped, and the red lines changed to yellow, then green. The motion grew smoother, more practiced. “Muscle memory,” Chuck blurted incredulously. Mako raised her eyebrows at him, triumphant.

“In part,” Doctor Gottlieb said. “But it’s not just physical. The Jaeger operating system, even in the Mark Is, adapts to the pilots. It learns their most commonly used moves to cut down on latency, and memorizes them in a sort of code shorthand. And of course there is a Drift recording, as well. Now.”

He reset the display and zoomed in on Lucky Seven’s chest. “The nuclear reactor powers the Jaeger through combat, but there’s always a bit of energy left over when the Jaeger comes home, stored in the drive system. The circuits are open when the Jaeger is dormant, to prevent accidents, but if one were to close--well, it could activate the Pons, and that could react with the OS, and if there was enough power, it could stretch and contract a muscle strand or two, just for a moment, and the Jaeger might, ah, twitch.”

_That was the word_. “So it’s possible,” Mako breathed.

“In theory,” Doctor Gottlieb said, taking off his glasses. “I’ve never witnessed it myself, of course, but I’ve had reports from some very insistent techni--”

A klaxon blared from the speaker over the lab’s entrance. Mako turned to Chuck, and saw a mix of fear and excitement in his eyes. She expected she had the same look in hers.

Doctor Gottlieb shut down the terminal and stood carefully, gripping his cane. “Kaiju alert,” he sighed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Actual scientific details? Ha! Japanese translation? Ha! (Oh God please correct me if I screwed up big time on anything here.)


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's kaiju clobbering time! (Featuring Scott Hansen being obnoxious.)

“Don’t worry about the backups,” Doctor Gottlieb told the research assistants as they scrambled around the terminals. “We can start over from this morning’s if need be. Just get down to the bunker.” He turned back to Mako and Chuck. “And we’d best go to LOCCENT.”

LOCCENT was the second-safest place in the Shatterdome, in the event that a kaiju ever attacked the building directly. Non-essential personnel took cover in the bunker, but Mako and Chuck were under orders to go straight to the Dome’s control room in an emergency. 

Out in the corridor, Doctor Gottlieb kept up with Chuck’s long stride, but Mako thought the twisted way he walked looked painful. She tugged on the back of Chuck’s shirt and he slowed down. “Please don’t rush for our sake, Doctor.” 

“Not at all, Miss Mori. I’m as eager as you are to know what’s happening.” 

As they neared LOCCENT, the Hansen brothers walked up in tan drivesuits, on their way to stand guard in the Miracle Mile. Chuck let his father hug him and his uncle muss his hair, and Mako looked away. “Good hunting, Rangers,” Doctor Gottlieb told them. Hercules and Scott saluted smartly and proceeded to the hangar. 

Doctor Gottlieb swiped his access card, and the door to LOCCENT slid open. The Shatterdome’s command center resembled the lab in that it contained several terminals and holographic displays. But unlike Gottlieb’s lab, LOCCENT was a mess. Cables stretched from terminal to terminal, sometimes blocking foot traffic. There were half-empty coffee mugs dangerously close to delicate electronic equipment. Breach spike readings and maintenance logs and inter-department memos were scattered everywhere. 

And LOCCENT was noisy, especially with movement in the Breach. Technicians darted from terminal to terminal, barking updates at each other. Chief LOCCENT Officer Camila Cusi shouldered her way through the chaos, calling up a different feed on each of three displays, then paused to show Marshal Stacker Pentecost something on her tablet. Mako moved to stand at her adoptive father’s side. “Category III,” Cusi told the Marshal. The lights of the displays caught her nose and eyebrow piercings, which reminded Mako of Tamsin Sevier. “But I think after this one we’ll have to move up a category. Codename Yamarashi. Swam due east from Challenger Deep. Hawaii is on full alert now.” 

Pentecost nodded, and as Cusi hurried off, the Marshal set one hand on Mako’s shoulder. Stacker Pentecost was tall and dark-skinned, with an air of authority and dignity about him. He wore a PPDC dress uniform, and kept his eyes on the holographic displays before him.

Mako glanced toward the back of the command center and found Chuck and Doctor Gottlieb at an unused terminal, programming a model of Yamarashi’s progress away from the Breach to determine how soon they should know where the kaiju was heading. It was a long wait, but the displays showed an endless stream of information, and Mako kept track of which Jaegers each Shatterdome was going to deploy. 

“Got a reading,” Cusi shouted, just when Doctor Gottlieb’s model said they should. Everyone looked up from what they were doing. “Three hundred miles north of Honolulu, still bearing east. Los Angeles has Mammoth Apostle and Gipsy Danger ready to drop. Landfall in…”

“Forty-seven minutes,” Doctor Gottlieb supplied, and Cusi confirmed it.

The Marshal got Mako a chair, but stayed standing himself. LOCCENT grew a little quieter, but there was plenty to do, and Lucky Seven was still out in the Miracle Mile, just in case. Mako looked at the video from one of the Jumphawks circling the Hansens’ Jaeger. Lucky Seven’s right hand clenched into a fist and relaxed, an unconscious act. 

As Yamarashi got closer to shore, Cusi pulled up video feeds from over Los Angeles. Mako saw cars in the streets, trying to evacuate the city. A camera in Long Beach showed an enormous, spine-covered kaiju ripping the _Queen Mary_ in half, and Marshal Pentecost said, “Call Lucky Seven back in.” 

By the time Herc and Scott Hansen joined them to watch the fight, every terminal in LOCCENT showed video from Los Angeles. Mammoth Apostle had fired a volley of anti-kaiju missiles, but Yamarashi was still standing. Gipsy Danger charged in. She was a brand new Jaeger with two brand new pilots, and she didn’t hold anything back in a fight. The first thing she did was drop into a running crouch and slam one shoulder into Yamarashi’s belly, away from the spines. The kaiju stumbled back and opened its jagged mouth. There was no sound with the video feed, but Mako could imagine its roar. Her heart was pounding, and this was just a live feed from four thousand miles away.

The back corner of LOCCENT grew loud with whoops and commentary in Australian accents. 

“Attaboy,” Herc said as Gipsy’s right elbow rocket kicked in, and her fist rammed into Yamarashi’s face. 

“That hurt,” Scott declared when Gipsy grappled the kaiju to the ground. 

“Why don’t they use the I-19?” Chuck demanded.

“No time to charge it,” said Herc, and it was true. Yamarashi kept Gipsy’s hands too busy with punching to power up the plasma cannon.

CTO Cusi whistled low, watching Gipsy Danger and Yamarashi leave a cloud of debris throughout the harbor district. “Think they’ve hit the billions in damage yet?”

“I doubt the Beckets will be getting a bill,” Marshal Pentecost said quietly.

Gipsy Danger grabbed the hook of a cargo crane. The Jaeger stepped behind Yamarashi, looped a length of the crane’s cable around what passed for the kaiju’s neck, and pulled. 

Yamarashi thrashed, pinned against Gipsy Danger. For a few seconds, it didn’t look like anything else would happen. Did kaiju even rely entirely on lungs for respiration? And Yamarashi’s spines were pressed into the Jaeger now, piercing the chest area, too close to the reactor. Gipsy was straining. They wouldn’t last much longer this way.

But then the cable cut through Yamarashi's skin, and Kaiju Blue flowed out. Gipsy Danger kept pulling, and after a moment the kaiju’s head was completely severed. It fell to the ground with a gout of blue blood. 

There was stunned silence in LOCCENT, until Scott Hansen said, “They don’t teach that at the academy.” Mako looked back at the Hansens. Chuck’s eyes were wide, but after a moment a deep-dimpled grin spread across his face. It _had_ been pretty cool.

Mako glanced up at her sensei. He murmured, “Get into the water, boys, get into the water.” She looked at the feed and saw that the Gipsy Danger’s hull was burning under all that Kaiju Blue. The Jaeger staggered toward the Pacific, its Conn-Pod corroding away. They managed to submerge and wash off the blood before any vital systems were damaged, and everyone in LOCCENT let out the breath they’d been holding. 

“All departments, give me full reports,” said Marshal Pentecost. Even though the kaiju had not attacked Lima, they needed to confirm that the Shatterdome was running at peak efficiency, that Lucky Seven’s deployment had been trouble free, and that all non-essential personnel had made it to the bunker underneath the building. “Doctor Gottlieb, I’ll have those numbers from you.” 

“Yes, sir,” Gottlieb said, already printing a series of readings and statistics. 

“Herc,” the Marshal called, and Chuck’s father strode over. “Would you escort Miss Mori to the mess hall for supper, please?” He turned to Mako. “It looks as though this will be a late evening.” 

Mako nodded and went with Ranger Hansen. Scott fell into step beside his brother, and Chuck walked at Mako’s right. “I’ve got some beer coupons saved up,” Scott said. “Reckon we should pass them around in the Beckets’ honor. You want a beer, Mako?”

“No thank you, Ranger Hansen.” Marshal Pentecost had told her that the hardest part of being a Jaeger pilot was the times you got suited up, stepped into your Jaeger, stood out in the Miracle Mile waiting with your pulse in your ears, and then the kaiju went somewhere else and you didn’t get to fight it. All that adrenaline with nowhere to go.

“Chuck,” Scott Hansen said, “you see a pretty girl, what do you do?”

“Offer her a drink, sir.” Chuck rolled his eyes at Mako. Even in Australia, fourteen was too young to drink.

“Too right. Trust me on that. You wouldn’t be here if your old man hadn’t followed my advice.”

Mako spent dinner in a buzzing, gossip-filled mess hall, eating in silence, wondering if the same keycode that had let her through the door onto the hangar catwalk would work on the ground level too. The Hansens had given her an idea.


	3. Chapter 3

Half the stuff in Lucky Seven’s spare parts bin should never have been there, and most of it wasn’t fit for Mako’s purposes. The good stuff, the parts in prime condition, were kept in storage cabinets by the gantry elevator that took Herc and Scott up to the Conn-Pod, but all that was behind another locked door. Mako didn’t need much. She had plenty of circuit boards and a soldering iron in her room, along with some microservos that would be about the right size. The rest was just hardware, and she could work with anything light and sturdy enough.

Luma lamp between her teeth, she reached down into the bin with both hands to retrieve a length of synapse conduit. It was dark in Lucky Seven’s bay, and in the rest of the hangar. Only a few standby lights shone on the Jaeger’s golden hull. She’d changed into a dark grey cardigan before leaving her room, the better to slip through the shadows.

This was one of the rare times that none of the maintenance crews were needed overnight. There were a dozen entrances to the hangar at ground level, and Mako had waited for the security patrol to pass by the one closest to Lucky Seven. The keycode worked, much to her relief. Inside it was eerily quiet, and the already vast space seemed even bigger without crews scurrying to make repairs.

Mako looped the conduit over her shoulder and turned to drop it to the deck below. Her light scanned over someone standing a few meters away, and Mako nearly slipped off the bin’s ladder.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Chuck asked. Mako shined the lamp at him again, and he ducked his head. He had his ratty green cap on, brim pulled low over his eyes. Like that was a great disguise. _Who’s that kid in the hangar? He’s not ginger, so it can’t be Chuck Hansen._

“Scavenging,” Mako told him.

“It’s past curfew.”

“It’s past your curfew, too.”

Chuck jutted his chin at her, and she finally moved the light away from his face. “Why’re you scavenging off Lucky Seven?”

“Because it just came back from a deployment with no combat and no damage, so it won’t need most of these things right away. And because a late Mark I has no use for a Mark II’s impulse cycler.” She showed him the part, dinged up but still usable.

He was unimpressed. “Is that the real reason, or are you just afraid of being caught near one of the other Jaegers?” Mako stared down at him. “I mean,” Chuck went on, “no one’s going to tell Marshal Pentecost’s daughter what she can’t do, but if you messed with anything other than my dad’s Jaeger, you’d actually stand a chance of getting in trouble.”

Unlike Chuck, who never got in trouble for anything. If he got caught in the hangar past curfew, Hercules Hansen would sigh, tell Chuck he had to start making better decisions, and then give him a share of Herc’s chocolate ration.

But it really wasn’t about her being in the hangar. Mako was reminded of a fiercely territorial dog. If she messed with anything other than the Hansens’ Jaeger, Chuck would be right beside her.

“Are you here to tell me what I can’t do?” Mako asked as she climbed down the ladder. She tossed the conduit and the cycler down on the deck, and the sound they made echoed through the hangar. “I have enough reasons to think this is impossible. I don’t need anyone else to say so.”

Chuck watched her a moment longer, then something changed in his eyes. “All right,” he said. “Let’s get to work.”

He had barely taken a step when Lucky Seven moved.

Mako looked up, twenty meters above them, at the Jaeger’s right hand. Slowly, it clenched into a fist. The noise it made, an awful low groan of metal on metal, filled the hangar. Suddenly Mako could not breathe. It was too loud, too much.

She could watch a Jaeger fight a kaiju all afternoon if the video feed was silent, but the noise from Lucky Seven’s last bit of pent-up energy overwhelmed her. She slumped against the storage bin. The cool metal at her back felt familiar. Mako shut her eyes and covered her ears, and tried to feel like she wasn’t drowning.

It took a long time for the noise to fade away. When Mako could finally breathe again, she opened her eyes. The Jaeger’s fingers were relaxed, just like they’d been a few minutes ago. Chuck stood facing away from her, one hand behind him like it would make a difference if he stayed between her and Lucky Seven. His head was tilted so far back that his cap had fallen off.

Mako carefully stood up straight and walked away from the bin, and found that Chuck was trembling. She picked up his cap. “You saw it,” she said firmly.

Chuck flinched, then turned it into a nod, and Mako felt a wave of relief. She didn’t know what she would have done if he denied it. Yell at him, maybe, the way this evening was going. “Yeah,” he said, then swallowed. “Yeah.” She handed him his cap. He took it without looking away from Lucky Seven, and wrung it it between his hands. After a minute, he let out a long, shaky breath. “Let’s go tell my dad.”


	4. Chapter 4

Lima, Peru  
October 17, 2017  
2048 hours

Hercules Hansen had just gotten into his bunk when Chuck barreled into the quarters they shared with his uncle. Mako followed, pulling off her shoes inside the door and setting the conduit and cycler down next to them. 

The Hansens kept their quarters tidy: all their dirty laundry was stuffed into one mesh bag, and there was one tablet between them. With three boys sharing one room, they couldn’t really leave anything lying around, or have projects sitting on the desk for weeks at a time the way Mako did, or it would get way out of hand. There wasn’t any decoration on the steel walls, but the place felt lived-in. That was just the effect the Hansens had on a room--their personalities expanded to fill it.

“Dad,” Chuck panted, red-faced. “We need to get a copy of Lucky’s Drift recording.” 

“Uh… huh,” Herc said, sitting up and glancing toward his brother. Scott was at the desk, watching the video of Gipsy Danger’s first fight again. “Mind if I ask why, Son?”

Chuck let it all out in one breath. “Mako-was-in-the-hangar-digging-through-Lucky-Seven’s-bin-and-I-could-tell-all-through-dinner-that-she-was-planning-something-so-I-went-to-make-sure-she-didn’t-get-hurt-or-whatever-and-LUCKY-SEVEN-MOVED-DAD-Mako-saw-it-too-I-swear-I-didn’t-imagine-it-so-we-need-the-Drift-recording-to-figure-out-what-triggered-the-movement.” Chuck inhaled. “ _Please_ , Dad.”

Herc looked over at Mako, and she said, “That’s mostly true. It would be very helpful to review the recording, Ranger Hansen. For scientific purposes.”

“I see,” Herc said. Chuck opened his mouth, automatically prepared to argue, and his father held up one hand. “I believe you, both of you. But there’s a problem.” He glanced over at Scott again, who was watching them with interest now, while Yamarashi’s death played on a fifteen-second loop. 

“You might not be Drift compatible,” Scott said.

Chuck glanced from his father to his uncle. “That just means we can’t pilot a Jaeger together. All I want to do is see the recording.”

“When you Drift with someone,” Herc explained patiently, “it means you share a mental vocabulary. You speak each other’s language, at the subconscious level. If you Drift with someone who isn’t compatible, the images and impressions won’t make sense. It’ll come across as gibberish, and you won’t be able to communicate.”

“Which means,” Scott said, shutting off the tablet, “if you or Miss Mori are not Drift compatible with me or your old man, the recording won’t help. At best you’ll come out of the Drift feeling confused, with a headache. At worst you might have brain damage.”

“Well, how would we ever know unless we try?” Chuck said, and Mako wondered if he’d even heard the part about brain damage. 

The rangers exchanged another glance. Herc took a breath. “There’s a reason the minimum age for the Jaeger academy is eighteen, and Pons training doesn’t happen until the second phase. The Drift is a serious thing. You have to train for it, and you have to know your partner, and trust them. And even if you stay in the Drift and don’t chase the RABIT, the things you see, the memories you share and don’t share, can be overpowering.”

This, at least, seemed to get through to Chuck. He deflated. Mako had never seen him so gloomy. She glanced to his father, and then away again quickly, because it hurt too much. Hercules Hansen looked like he’d been kicked in the gut. For a minute she thought he might get up and bring them the Drift recording after all. 

If Scott Hansen made an off-color joke now, it might sour the mood further, so Mako spoke first. “It’s just a setback,” she said to Chuck. “We’ll figure something else out.”

“Yeah,” Chuck said, still sulking. “I never knew you had to be a Jedi Master just to see a Drift recording, let alone jockey a Jaeger.”

Scott Hansen barked a laugh as he flopped down on his cot, which creaked in protest. “I always thought of me and your old man as more like Han and Chewie.”

“Swear on the Breach,” Herc Hansen growled, “if you think I’m Chewie _I will end you_.”

Mako looked at each of them in turn, brow furrowed. “You have no idea what we’re talking about, do you?” Chuck said, and she shook her head. He turned to his father, eyes wide.

Herc looked relieved that they’d found a way to salvage the evening. “Please have a seat, Miss Mori,” he said with a smile, and Mako sat at the desk as Chuck queued up a movie on the tablet. Then Chuck climbed up to his bunk and Herc tossed Mako a Lucky Seven jacket, which was very warm once she’d had it on for a minute. Scott Hansen reached over to hit the lights, and they all peered at the too-small tablet screen.

That was how Marshal Pentecost found her two hours later. He waited in the doorway for the destruction of the Death Star and the Rebel Alliance’s recognition of the heroes. “But the Empire still exists, and Darth Vader is still alive,” Mako protested--quietly, because Chuck and Scott had both fallen asleep. She paraphrased something she’d heard the Jaeger pilots say. “The job is not done.”

“That’s why there are two more movies,” Herc told her. He yawned hugely. “Come by tomorrow evening, Mako, and we’ll watch the next one.” Herc glanced at the Marshal, who nodded. 

Mako got up and hung the jacket over the chair, said goodnight to Ranger Hansen, and collected her shoes and equipment. Pentecost eyed the conduit and cycler, but didn’t say anything as he walked her to her room. At the door he stopped, and said in Japanese, “If you must stay out past curfew, make sure you’re with the Hansens.”

She nodded up at him, wondering if he knew where else she’d been, and Stacker Pentecost hugged her. “Goodnight, Mako.”

“Goodnight, Sensei.” 

In her room, Mako set what she’d scavenged from Lucky Seven on her desk. She was tempted to start working right away, but it had been a long day, and when she sat on her bed, gravity carried her the rest of the way down.

She dreamed of giants who stirred in their sleep. She dreamed of rummaging through a parts bin that was also somehow inside a Jaeger, and she could not get out when the walls began to move toward her. She dreamed of Alderaan exploding, over and over, but instead of sparks and fragments of earth, what flew out into space was Yamarashi's blue blood.


	5. Chapter 5

Lima, Peru  
October 18, 2017  
0834 hrs

Their tutor took one look at the construction in progress on Mako’s desk, and gave her and Chuck the day off to work on it. Robotics was, after all, one of Mako’s best subjects, and this was a sophisticated project. After breakfast, they laser-cut some scrap metal in the hangar’s machine shop under Herc’s supervision, then walked back to Mako’s room with their arms full of steel.

Chuck had steady hands, so he held the more fiddly pieces in place while Mako soldered. Steel, conduit, servo, one to the other in a neat row. After two hours, she stuck the leads to the top of a car battery, and the length of metal segments contracted. One complete muscle strand. 

“Now we have to do that four more times?” said Chuck. 

Mako looked at her hand, closed the fingers and opened them again. “Thirteen more times.”

Chuck let out a breath and slumped down to the deck, his back against Mako’s bunk. “How are you supposed to interface with it?” 

“A control glove and a basic Pons,” Mako said. She opened a drawer and pulled out a ring of sticky sensor pads she’d gotten from sickbay. The control glove would do most of the work, but she needed to record the mental impulses as well as the physical for the experiment to really count.

“And the OS?” Chuck pressed. “You’re building one from scratch, yeah? That’ll take years.”

“You can help. You’re good with code.” 

He ignored the compliment. “Mako. It’ll take years.” 

_So what if it does? What else will I do until I can enter the Jaeger academy?_ Mako swiveled her chair away from the muscle strand to face him. “Okay,” she said. 

“You’re going to do it anyway,” Chuck sighed. “You’re going to reinvent the Jaeger.” 

“If we can’t get Lucky Seven’s Drift recording, I don’t have any other choice.” 

Chuck’s watch beeped. “Time to go see Doctor Gottlieb,” he said as he got to his feet.

Mako pulled on her cardigan. “Good. I have questions for him.”

As soon as Gottlieb paused for breath in the midst of a discourse on Breach physics, Mako raised her hand. “Yes, Miss Mori.” 

Doctor Gottlieb hated being interrupted. He also hated to change the subject--especially when it involved being interrupted. But he loved answering questions, especially good questions, and if Mako framed it correctly, she might be able to divert the rest of the presentation. “Doctor Gottlieb, this is unrelated, but I have been wondering about the purpose of left and right hemispheres in Jaeger piloting. It doesn’t seem tied to the physical operation like it is in the human brain.”

“Well, no,” Gottlieb said, “the relationship in the human brain is inverse, with the left motor cortex controlling the right side of the body, and vice versa. In the Jaeger, the relationship is direct. The pilot in the 01 feedback cradle position controls the right side of the Jaeger, and the 02 pilot controls the left.”

“Under most circumstances,” Mako said, thinking of when one pilot had to perform a two-handed operation on the center console. 

“Marshal Pentecost is the only Ranger who has ever piloted solo.” 

_And lived_ , Mako added silently.

“But the Rangers still have to move in unison,” Chuck interjected.

“The operating system responds better when input from both pilots corresponds. Now, that being said, the Jaeger does not _require_ pilots to mirror each other. The feedback cradles guide a passive pilot into an active pilot’s motions, but you might be wondering about after the fight ends, when pairs of Rangers keep moving together outside of the Conn-Pod. This is a product of the Drift. Would both of you stand up, please?”

They did, and Gottlieb dug around under his terminal and pulled out a steel case about eight inches high. It was the kind that was meant to survive disasters up to and including a kaiju attack, and inside, Mako knew, were rows and rows of backup hard drives. Gottlieb shoved the case across the floor with his cane. “Miss Mori, step here.” She did. “The feedback cradles’ processors compensate for height differences between Rangers--you should have seen the bother we had with the Kaidanovskys. In the absence of an algorithm, this box will have to do.” 

Gottlieb moved around behind her, and a moment later Chuck’s back was pressed to hers. “What you’re about to do is an exercise from the early days of the Jaeger academy. Miss Mori, you’re going to move one or both arms, and Mister Hansen, you will echo the motion as best you can based on what you feel.” 

“I can’t see her,” Chuck protested. 

“Indeed,” Gottlieb said, leaning on his cane. “And there is no shortage of visual input in a Conn-Pod: heads-up displays and feeds from LOCCENT, not to mention a kaiju in front of you. Do you plan to stare at your co-pilot in the middle of combat?”

Mako felt Chuck huff. She closed her eyes, made her back flat against his, and slowly raised her left arm. Several seconds later she felt him move, but where she stopped, he kept going. Mako put her right arm out to the side. His shoulder turned with hers, closer to unison this time. She made a fist, but there was no way to know whether he picked up on the twitch of muscles in her shoulder and copied her. Mako turned her left hand palm-up. She didn’t feel Chuck do anything.

“Dreadful,” Doctor Gottlieb said with what almost looked like a smile on his face. Mako and Chuck dropped their arms at once. “Mister Hansen, you lead this round, and this time, announce your moves in three words or less.”

“Left up slow,” Chuck said. Mako moved to comply, but felt him shift on the other side. “No--bollocks--right. This is backwards, Doctor Gottlieb.”

“The principle is the same,” Gottlieb said sagely. “You’ll just have to put a bit more thought into it, Mister Hansen.”

Chuck took a breath. “Right up slow.” Mako lifted her right arm, waiting for Chuck’s shoulder to stop moving. “Left to the side. Fists. Right hook.” 

She attempted the Hansen hook, and the follow-through took her away from Chuck’s back, so they spent a minute getting back into position. “Arms straight out. Fists.” She felt him brace for something. “Yamarashi.”

Their elbows knocked together as they both mimed yanking a crane cable back against their chests. 

“And that,” Gottlieb said, “is why the Jaegers don’t use physical input alone.” He raised a brow at them. “If I had to make a pronouncement, I’d say you two are Drift compatible.” 

Mako got down from the crate, and tried to stop herself from beaming at both of them. Chuck didn’t even try--he had a fierce grin on his face. 

Mako thought of what Herc Hansen had said about mental vocabulary. She thought about it as Doctor Gottlieb dismissed them, and they went back to work on the next muscle strand. She thought about it through supper too, and she thought about it as Chuck started _The Empire Strikes Back_ on the Hansens’ tablet that evening. 

When the credits rolled, she blurted in Japanese, “That was worse than the first one’s ending! How did anyone wait three years to find out what happened?”

Three amused ginger heads turned to regard her. Mako took a breath. “When can we watch the next one?” she asked in English. 

The tablet pinged, and Herc, still grinning, picked it up. The expression slid off his face. “Not for a while, Mako.”

“What?” Chuck said, shifting in his place on the floor next to her. 

Herc passed the tablet to his brother, who looked it over. “PPDC’s transferring Lucky Seven back to Sydney,” Scott said. “Effective tomorrow.” 

Chuck’s back wasn’t against Mako’s, but she felt him go slack. “I’m sorry, Son,” Herc said softly. He had that awful, painful look on his face again, but the look on Chuck’s was worse. It was just empty.

Mako faced away from the Hansens as she retrieved her shoes. “Please excuse me,” she murmured. “It’s almost curfew. Thank you for the movie.”

As she left, Chuck was climbing up to his bunk, avoiding his father’s eyes.

When she got to her room, Mako changed into her dark grey cardigan, then left again.


	6. Chapter 6

The Lima Shatterdome was only a few months old, and when Mako had first arrived, the security protocols were still patchy. A well meaning J-Tech officer had sat her down at a terminal one afternoon and showed her how to poke around the servers, and when she was left to do that on her own, Mako had come across a database of six-digit numerical codes with its permissions left wide open. She copied a few dozen of the numbers, and one afternoon she tried some on the keypad of a locked door. It had worked, and what was behind the door was nothing but some spare networking equipment, but the same code had let her into the hangar, and a few other places around the Dome.

She tried it now, in Lucky Seven’s shadow, on the keypad that would open the metal cage that surrounded the gantry and its elevator. Nothing happened. Mako swore softly in Japanese, then pulled the list from her pocket and tried the next code. The keypad’s LED blinked red and then reset. The next code did the same.

“Those won’t work because they’re general access, and Lucky Seven’s gantry is Ranger-only.” 

Mako spun, her back to the cage door. “How did you get past your father and uncle?”

“They went to the Kwoon,” Chuck said. “What is it with you, eh? You just don’t quit. You stole from the parts bin and now you want to break into my dad’s Jaeger and steal the Drift recording?”

“I’m not stealing anything,” Mako shot back, showing him the blank hard drive she’d brought. “I’m making a copy. This is the last chance.”

“The last chance for you to get brain damage when you try to Drift with it?”

She shook her head. “Your father and uncle have run enough deployments that Lucky Seven’s Pons device will have a full impression of them. If I can build a system that understands their mental language, I don’t need to Drift with it. The computer will translate for me.”

“Yeah, you’re still thinking years out,” he said, exasperated. “You’ll have graduated the academy by the time you finish. So let me speed things up for you.” Mako tilted her head to one side as Chuck reached into the pocket of his jeans and pulled out a keycard. When he swiped it through the pad, the LED turned green and the cage door clanked open. Chuck stepped past her.

“You’re going to Drift with the recording? And get brain damage?”

“First of all,” Chuck said, turning to face her, “Uncle Scott made that up to scare us off, obviously. I am not going to get brain damage. Second, of the two of us, who is more likely to be Drift compatible with my dad and uncle? Yeah, that’s what I thought. And third--” he elbowed the call button for the elevator, which opened for them at once--”maybe I don’t want you to know all the stuff my dad keeps in his head.”

Mako looked away, cheeks burning. Chuck stared her down, and finally Mako squared her shoulders and met his gaze again. “I did not consider the disrespect to your father,” she said formally. “I’m very sorry. Please forgive me, Chuck.”

His expression softened, and he opened his mouth, but the next thing Mako heard was a metallic screech. It faded into a rumble, followed by a soft whine. They turned to look up at Lucky Seven, but the noise hadn’t been nearly loud enough to come from the Jaeger. 

It happened again, and they both found the source this time: the storage cabinets. One of the doors rattled. 

Mako took a step toward the cabinets, but Chuck stuck out his arm to block her, and walked forward himself. As she jutted her chin at his back, he turned on his luma lamp and reached for the cabinet, which had gone quiet once more. 

Chuck tugged the door open, and immediately yelped and leapt away from the cabinet. Mako ran to him and put her hand on his shoulder. “It’s some kind of giant mole or something,” he gasped. 

For a moment the homonym confused her, and Mako had to work out what kind of mole he meant. The thing in the cabinet whined. Mako grabbed Chuck’s lamp and inched forward, eased the door open again, and shined the lamp inside.

“It’s a dog,” she said over her shoulder, and reached in to pick it up. The poor thing was terrified, squirming in her hands, its skin sagging around its face. Just a puppy, barely weaned, and no collar. She struggled to remember the breed--English bulldog. Mako wondered what kind of giant moles they had in Australia. 

“It is?” Chuck stepped up behind her. “Give it back then. I saw it first.”

She looked back at him, weighing the creature in her hands against his loneliness, against her own. The Hansens were an odd family, but the only other time she felt so comfortable was when she and Pentecost visited Tamsin. She had no one her age around except Chuck the whole time she’d been in Lima, and before that in Anchorage, she was completely alone. It would be nice to have a companion. “You thought he was a mole,” she said, turning to face Chuck.

“Oh, come on, Mako, I have to leave in the morning.”

“And if I give him to you, I might never see him again.”

Chuck looked stricken. Maybe he really hadn’t thought about that, but Mako had. There were a lot of Shatterdomes. It was entirely possible that they wouldn’t run into each other, that when they finally went to the Jaeger academy they’d be two years apart, that they’d end up stationed on opposite sides of the Pacific. “Don’t be ridiculous," Chuck told her. "Of course you will.” 

Mako looked down at the dog. “You can have him if you name him after me,” she said.

Chuck screwed up his face in bewilderment. “He’s a _boy_ ,” he said. Then, “I’ll call him Max.”

 _Close enough_. Mako handed over the puppy, which stopped struggling as soon as Chuck held him. He tucked Max into the crook of his arm, close against his side, like a rugby ball. Chuck grinned, and Mako did not regret her decision. “Come on,” he said, and walked off toward the Kwoon.

Mako followed, but glanced back at Lucky Seven on her way out of the hangar. She’d just have to do this the slow way.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This took so much longer than the other chapters because I DIDN'T WANT IT TO END. Thanks for reading, friends.

There was a crowd in the combat room. Mako recognized the pilots of Matador Fury and Diablo Intercept, among their tech crews. She and Chuck had to push their way to the front of the crowd, and then Mako understood why they were all there. For one thing, it was the last chance anyone in Lima would get to see either of the Hansens fight for a while. For another, it wasn’t every day the Marshal stepped onto the Kwoon. 

Mako had never seen Stacker Pentecost in an undershirt before, and she stared at his drivesuit scars for a minute before she noticed there was a boxing match in progress. The Marshal’s opponent was moving fast, and only when Chuck led the way to his uncle at the front of the crowd did Mako realize Pentecost was sparring with Herc.

Hercules Hansen’s footwork was, from what Mako understood of the sport, nearly flawless. He had a smaller frame than the Marshal, and that made his maneuvers look something like a planet orbiting a sun. He fired off a jab here and there, but he mostly kept Pentecost turning, and bobbed effortlessly under the Marshal’s whip-quick punches. A buzz of excitement passed through the crowd with each hit. Mako thought she saw money, or perhaps beer coupons, change hands. 

“Come on, Herc,” Scott Hansen murmured, shifting from side to side like he was the one facing the Marshal. Mako wondered if they were ghost Drifting, just a little. 

Hansen and Pentecost clinched, and CTO Cusi stepped in to break them up. She dashed back to the edge of the Kwoon as they circled again. Something changed in their stances. The crowd changed too, getting louder, anticipating the end. “Come on,” Scott shouted. Herc moved in, taking the Marshal’s punches on his ribs in order to get close. That was a sacrifice in points, but Mako didn’t see anyone keeping score. This would end when one of them was on the mat. 

Pentecost tried to dodge the right hook that came at his face, and he almost made it. From where Mako stood, it looked like Herc’s knuckles barely grazed his nose. But the Marshal stepped back and held up one hand, the other over his face. Herc dropped his fists at once, and the crowd went still.

“He’s gonna get us kicked out,” Scott Hansen breathed. 

Mako grabbed a towel and a bottle of water and ran to him. “Sensei?” 

“It’s all right,” Pentecost told her. “Not broken.” It was bleeding freely, though, and he held the towel under his nose. “Well fought, Ranger,” he said to Herc, who saluted and finally relaxed. The crowd applauded his victory, then started to thin out now that the show was over.

“That was _awesome_ ,” Chuck said, and the look of utter fulfillment on Herc’s face made Mako smile too. 

Then Chuck’s dad saw Max. “What have you got there, Son?” 

Chuck held out the little squirming ball for Herc’s inspection. “He was in the storage lockers under Lucky’s gantry,” he blurted, too excited to bother hiding the fact that he was somewhere he should not have been. “Please let me keep him. _Please_ , Dad.” 

Mako could tell this was the part where Herc was supposed to pretend to consider it, but instead his eyes fixed on his brother. “You put it in the storage cabinets?” he snapped. 

“I would have gone back tonight if he didn’t find it,” Scott protested. 

“Hansen,” said the Marshal softly, and all three of them stiffened, shoulders square. “Did you bring a dog into my Shatterdome?”

Mako saw the amusement in Pentecost’s eyes, and Herc did too, but he played along anyway. “Sorry, sir. Temporarily, sir. And if it pissed, my lousy brother will hose down the locker.” 

“Fine,” Scott grumbled. He reached into his jacket and pulled out a leash and a broad leather collar. “Come on, kid, let’s go check for puddles.” 

Mako started to follow them, but Herc said, “A moment, Miss Mori?”

She turned back and found Herc sitting beside the Marshal at the edge of the Kwoon. “I don’t have any other dogs hidden around the Dome,” Herc said as she approached, “but I want you to know I’m grateful to you for spending time with my boy. It’s not easy to grow up in a place like this. You’re a good friend to Chuck, and I’ll do what I can so you get to see each other again.” 

Herc held out his right hand, and Mako shook it firmly, not trusting herself to answer around the lump that was suddenly in her throat. 

The next morning it was still there as she handed Chuck what she had made on the laser cutter before breakfast. “A dog tag,” he said, turning it over to read the neat engraving. CTO Cusi had assigned Max a ranger number in the PPDC’s network, to avoid any future bureaucratic issues with keeping a dog in a Shatterdome. “Thanks, Mako,” he said as he worked the split ring onto Max’s collar. He smiled at her, but his eyes were red-rimmed. “Message me the minute you get that hand working, yeah? Send a video.” 

Mako nodded, patted Max once more, and stepped back from under the Jumphawk as Chuck climbed inside. Marshal Pentecost put his arm around her shoulders, and the Jumphawk’s blades spun up. As it lifted off from the helipad, Mako and Chuck raised their right hands in unison.

She and Pentecost had just come back inside when the Shatterdome’s speakers broadcast the paging chime. “Miss Mori to the research lab, at your convenience,” said Doctor Gottlieb’s voice. 

She glanced up at the Marshal, and he nodded, so they parted ways near the hangar and she hurried to the K-Science department. “Thank you for coming so quickly, Miss Mori,” Gottlieb said as she entered. “I’ve been informed of the experiment you’re conducting.”

Mako braced herself. If Gottlieb tried to tell her she was wasting her time, that it had taken thousands of people working in concert to create the Mark Is and their operating system, that the Drift was not a toy, she wasn’t sure what she would do. It would be so much harder to finish this if she couldn’t ask Doctor Gottlieb for advice.

“I applaud your spirit of scientific inquiry,” Gottlieb said, and Mako wondered if he’d ever actually applauded anything in his life. “But it seems to me that starting from scratch will take much longer than warranted by the parameters of the experiment. You wish to duplicate activity in a dormant Jaeger, not build one from the ground up.” 

“That’s what Chuck said, too,” Mako told him, feeling dismayed but determined to hear him out. If someone had to shoot down her plans, it might as well be an expert.

Doctor Gottlieb turned to his terminal, where a progress bar was filling rapidly. “Question Mister Hansen’s judgment in whatever other areas you wish, but he does know his way around machine language.” The progress bar flashed its completion, and Gottlieb unplugged a cable that linked the terminal to a tablet. “The Mark IV OS has been built to accommodate as many as three Drift partners and pilots, but it’s a relatively simple matter to compile a single-user copy. This one can process simple mental and physical input, and will also make a Drift recording. You’d never be able to battle a kaiju using it, but it’s perfectly sufficient to operate, say, a hand.” 

He swiveled his chair and presented the tablet to her. “Think of it as the mobile version,” Doctor Gottlieb said.

Mako took the tablet in both hands, staring at the PPDC emblem on the screen, speechless with gratitude to Doctor Gottlieb and to whichever Hansen had told him. She clutched the tablet to her chest and bowed formally, which seemed to surprise him, and he tried an awkward, halting bow back. “Be about your work, Miss Mori,” he said, and she walked as quickly as she could back to her room.

Two days later she linked together three complete muscle strands, fixed at one end to her desk. Not a hand yet, just one finger, but it was enough for a start. She checked every connection three times before she set a ring of sensor pads over her brow and slipped the control glove onto her right hand.

The operating system looked much like a Jaeger’s heads-up display, and it showed her brainwaves alongside the active physical sensors. She activated the recording, then clenched her fist. With no latency at all, the three muscle strands contracted, curling back on themselves within their steel structure like a beckoning finger. 

Mako repeated the motion until her hand was sore and the muscle strands moved free and smooth, then stopped the recording and put the operating system in standby mode, which left the circuit between the muscle strand and its battery open. 

She got onto her bunk with her regular tablet and turned on its video function, opened her English language workbook, and settled in to wait.


End file.
